Ben jonson (1573-1637)

Jonson took his calling as a poet with the greatest seriousness, asserting the dignity of the profession. When Jonson published in 1616 his collected works—The Works of Benjamin Jonson — it was the first time an English author had been so presumptuous. He succeeded in making professional authorship more respectable.

Ben Jonson was Shakespeare’s younger contemporary. He was an actor, playwright, poet and poet laureate, scholar, critic, translator, man of letters, and head, for the first time in English, of a literary “school,” the so-called Sons of Ben.

Jonson's life was tough and turbulent. He was educated at Westminster School by the great classical scholar William Camden, worked briefly at his stepfather's trade, and then entered the army and went to Flanders. Returning to England about 1594, he began to work as an actor and playwright. He took part in an intricate set of literary wars with his fellow playwrights. In his latter years he became the unofficial literary dictator of London, the king's pensioned poet, a favourite around the court, and the good friend of outstanding men. In addition, he engaged the affection of younger men poets and speculative thinkers who delighted to christen themselves his “sons.” Sons of Ben provided the nucleus of the entire “Cavalier school” of English poets.

The first of Jonson's great plays was Every Man in His Humour, in which Shakespeare acted a leading role. It was also the first of the so-called comedies of humours, in which the prevailing eccentricities and ruling passions of men (i.e., their “humours”) were exposed to satiric deflation. Volpone and The Alchemist are two supreme satiric comedies of the English stage. Both have been repeatedly “adapted” and “modernized,” but it is believed that the original texts are more lively and vital. Volpone or the Fox is the story of a miser, Volpone, who tries to increase his wealth by a variety of stratagems, aided by his cunning servant Mosca.; it is a vigorous satire on the greed and hypocrisy of the times. Starting in 1605, Jonson began writing for the court a series of masques. Thus he became closely involved with the life of the court, and in 1616 he was appointed poet laureate with a substantial pension. In 1628 he was paralyzed by a stroke and remained confined to bed for the last nine years of his life.

Jonson was a classicist, a moralist and a reformer of the drama. In comedy, he presented the London of his day with a strenuous effort towards realism, and an attempt to contain the action within the “unities” of time, place, and theme. He showed a consistency of method. His characters were, as he described them, “humours” characters: one element in their moral nature was displayed throughout the play and exposed for ridicule. Jonson used this static type of character with great success to emphasize the weakness and the moral diseases of human nature.His gallery of “humours” is so extensive that he is in a way the Dickens of the seventeenth century, though without Dickens’s sense of high spirits, or his sentimentality. The corruption of the new wealth, which commerce was giving to the middle class, added bitterness to Jonson’s comedy. The nearest approach to this method in Shakespeare is the character of Malvolio.

Jonson the pure poet finds expression in his songs, often intended for musical accompaniment, but generally beautifully melodic even without it. His poems which are written in smooth, classical style were a great influence on the course of poetry in the 17th century.